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The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

by
August 1980, no. 23

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

Macmillan, 337 pp, $19.95, 0 333 27751 1

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

by
August 1980, no. 23

The Transit of Venus has been widely acclaimed, and justly so: it is a great novel of passion and ambition, success and failure, written with elegance and wit, and magnificently structured. Still, despite the critical superlatives, few critics have attempted to come to grips with the power of Hazzard’s writing. There have been the inevitable comparisons with Jane Austen, and some attention has been paid to the symbolic connotations of the title, but little more. The prose and structure of the novel are worth examining in some detail because, seven years in the making, it is a most crafted and sculpted work of literary art.


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Rosemary Creswell reviews 'The Transit of Venus' by Shirley Hazzard

The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

Macmillan, 337 pp, $19.95, 0 333 27751 1

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